Many Cool Animals

On Wednesday, we picked up the truck. Long story short, it’s pretty cool. Here’s a picture, in which you should ignore me eating lunch inside:

Yesterday (Thursday), we took the truck for a test drive. Mum found a nearby private game park called Daan Viljoen, so we decided to go there. No sooner than we had driven through the gates, we spotted a giraffe over a small valley. Upon closer inspection, we located a minimum of five more, plus a handful of oryx and zebras. It needn’t be said that we were all very excited. To start off with, I took some pictures with my phone, using a pair of binoculars to effectively zoom in. They’re not brilliant, so I’ll spare you the details. After this, dad got his proper camera out, with the super-duper safari lenses on, and we took some infinity better pictures on that. Here are a few:

After several minutes of gawking at distant giraffes, dad told us too look behind the truck. It just so happened that a small group of springbok had wandered to join us. Once again, many pictures, both good and bad, ensued. 

After that debacle, and once the springbok had wandered off, we continued to reception, and then set off on a small hike. We didn’t see anything big, but we did see several rock hyrax, and some interesting footprints. We all took pictures. 

We all returned very hot, and stopped off for a drink in the restaurant, before setting off on a drive around the safari loop. We hoped that this would be more successful, and we weren’t wrong. Not five minutes after setting off, we came across a car stopped in the middle of the road. As we rounded the corner, we saw just why that car had stopped. A giraffe was peering haughty at us from the side of the road. Our excitement went through the roof. Once the other car had left, we pulled up very close to the ridiculous animal, and got out of the car to take pictures. 

As we were ogling the giraffe, we saw that there were more on the other side of the road. We spent a good twenty minutes fawning over all of them. 

In the end, we had to keep moving, and we set off once again. This time it was a bit of a disappointment, as we saw nothing until the last few hundred meters, in which we saw a couple of warthog. All in all, it was a pretty successful trip.